How to Increase Direct Bookings for Hotels? 10 Tips
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Looking for an easy and efficient way to increase your hotel direct bookings? In the modern hospitality industry, working on your direct bookings is required to boost revenue and decrease your dependence on third-party OTAs.
If you already have an established direct booking website, one of the ways to keep it going is to apply search engine optimization (SEO) to boost your site’s online visibility. It helps to retain bookings and grow the base of your potential guests by simply optimizing your hotel’s website to rank higher on search engines. But it is only a part of what can be done to increase direct bookings.
In this article, we’ll take a look at working SEO techniques and hotel direct booking strategies as well as list some solutions that will help you achieve that goal.
Top 10 Tips for Getting More Direct Bookings
So, how to get more direct hotel bookings? It can be achieved by combining various measures, such as SEO and efficient booking management techniques allowing you not only to promote your accommodation services to a bigger number of potential guests but also help you to stay competitive.
When it comes to optimizing your site to appear on top of the search results, there are multiple techniques available. While some of them may be suitable for most modern businesses, others apply specifically to the hospitality industry. Below we’ll take a look at the top 10 direct bookings techniques from both categories and share how they influence your site when applied correctly.
1. Add a Theme with Responsive Booking Forms
One of the first steps to improve hotel direct bookings lies in having a well-designed theme that has a responsive design and an online booking form optimized for mobile. By choosing a modern, SEO-friendly theme that has integrated & responsive booking forms, you can boost your site’s potential to appear higher in search results. Such forms adapt seamlessly to any screen size, from desktops to smartphones. MotoPress provides a variety of hotel & vacation rental WordPress themes designed for direct bookings. Some of the topics these themes reflect include:
- Bed and breakfast hotel;
- Single property rental;
- Resort hotel;
- Apartment booking;
- Camping.
Powered by the Hotel Booking plugin, these themes allow for not just a smooth direct booking experience but also for easier accommodation and inventory management for hotels using an integrated booking engine that works well with WordPress. Additionally, the plugin provides support for extra add-ons available on the MotoPress website. By choosing a theme with clean menus, easy-to-read fonts, and layouts, you’ll also increase the chances of direct bookings thanks to the improved usability. For a simpler availability booking calendar with booking options, consider the WordPress Booking Calendar from the same provider.
2. Use Keywords
In case you already have a website with a mobile-friendly and fully functional booking form, we recommend taking care of keyword research. This helps you discover appropriate keywords to use later in your site’s SEO content to drive hotel direct bookings. By using services like Ahrefs and Ubersuggest, you can find the words to use on your website’s key areas, such as titles, headings, alt texts of images, meta descriptions, etc. We recommend focusing on long-tail keywords that reflect what your potential clients may search for, such as “family-friendly hotel in downtown Chicago” or “pet-friendly beach resort in Florida.” By properly placing such keywords, you can boost your visibility and help Google and other search engines understand what your business offers. Moreover, by using relevant keywords on your website pages, you can:
- Attract the proper audience;
- Help your website stand out from the competition;
- Maximize return on investment in content;
- Drive traffic through better search engine rankings.
However, never do keyword stuffing, as Google (and people!) are very much against it.
3. Work on Technical SEO
Technical SEO allows you to ensure that your direct booking website is not only available for search engine indexing but performs well for your guests as well. The key trick here lies in making your site secure and fast in terms of performance. This includes taking care of the following as a way to get more direct bookings:
- Improving page loading speed;
- Using HTTPS for secure site functioning;
- Decluttering and minimizing site code;
- Structuring the site for easier navigation;
- Check out if WordPress plugins you use don’t break your SEO;
- Change your theme to boost your SEO.
As a result, you’ll get a fast, secure, and well-structured website that has better mobile usability, and higher data security, and makes it clear to search engines that your site is reliable and user-friendly. This is key for increasing direct bookings.
4. Optimize your Website for Local SEO
Another necessary step to take if you’re learning how to increase hotel bookings is connected with local SEO. This type of search engine optimization involves claiming and optimizing your Google Vacation Rentals. Add accurate contact information, quality photos, and a convincing description of your hotel or property. You can also use local keywords here that mention the name of your city and core locations or attractions that can be found nearby in order to increase hotel direct bookings. Don’t forget to encourage satisfied guests to leave reviews on Google and TripAdvisor. With positive ratings, such reviews will boost your visibility in local search results. Additionally, we recommend paying attention to the following:
- List your hotel on local directories;
- Ensure name, address, and phone number consistency;
- Implement local business schema markup;
- Add location pages if you provide your accommodation services in multiple locations;
- Build local backlinks with tourism sites and blogs.
5. Provide Quality Content
Adding relevant content optimized with keywords can also drastically improve your SEO & book direct strategy. Besides, it can provide variation to the pages with hotel room descriptions and booking forms. For example, you can publish informative content filled with appropriate keywords in the blog, especially if you are already using a WordPress theme featuring such functionality. This will keep potential guests on your site longer as well as deliver content for AI-powered search systems and assistants. Eventually, such an approach will increase the likelihood of a direct booking, while also allowing you to:
- Build and increase trust;
- Drive social sharing;
- Improve internal linking for your content;
- Encourage repeatable visits.
6. Optimize Page Titles and Meta Descriptions
After you finish keyword research, it is advised to take care of adding the proper keywords into meta titles, descriptions, and other key areas as mentioned above. These areas are the first things your future guests will see in search results. Thanks to varied WordPress plugins for search engine optimization, such as Yoast SEO, you can simply specify meta titles, page links, and descriptions as well as keywords for hotel direct bookings. This allows you to avoid editing the code of your website to add or edit these elements. Besides, well-optimized titles and descriptions not only improve your search rankings but also entice users to visit your site instead of booking through third parties. Additional reasons to consider this step of SEO include:
- Enhancing mobile search appearance;
- Showcasing selling points of your hotel services;
- Reducing bounce rates;
- Making your brand visible and recognizable.
7. Add Authentic Reviews
As we mentioned above, an efficient way to improve direct bookings is to enable reviews on your hotel website. This allows for not just showcasing user-generated content that search engines value but also building trust with new & potential guests. By incorporating such a feature into your site and encouraging guests to leave reviews, which you can easily do with the Hotel Booking Review add-on, you can positively influence the reputation of your hotel. Moreover, by integrating guest reviews from such platforms as Booking.com, Tripadvisor, or Airbnb, you will be able to increase click-through rates and improve local SEO rankings as well as convince site visitors of the quality experience your hospitality business provides. Other benefits of adding reviews include:
- Valuable customer feedback;
- Better social proof for new site visitors;
- Improved booking confidence for potential guests;
- Enhanced transparency.
8. Introduce Various Payment Methods
Payment methods are also essential for the comfort of your guests’ online booking. As a result, it directly influences user experience, making the payment process an impactful factor of your strategy aimed to increase hotel direct bookings. By integrating WooCommerce Payments or other online payment services (works for WordPress site), you can create a smooth and secure checkout process with the support of many payment methods. In turn, it reduces the abandonment rate and reassures users of their transactions’ safety. This improves overall engagement, which positively influences your site’s online ranking even if you’re just learning how to get more hotel bookings. Other payment methods modern WordPress plugins for hotel support are:
9. Take Care of Dynamic Pricing
Aside from introducing more payment methods, it is also necessary to take care of dynamic pricing. This allows for not just automating prices but also makes it easier for you to manage accommodation pricing based on current market trends in the hospitality industry. Thanks to the Hotel Booking addon that integrates PriceLabs with your website, you can easily automate your room rates based on competitor prices, ensuring you stay at the top of the game. Aside from the obvious advantages of saving your time and maximizing revenue, you’ll also increase your site’s trustworthiness, which is crucial for SEO. This also helps with understanding how to get more direct bookings without paying extra for custom-made dynamics pricing tools.
10. Add Multicurrency Support
One more tip we’d like to share is directly connected with currencies you use on your website if you want to know how to increase direct bookings for hotels. If you want to know how to increase hotel bookings and cater to the needs of your website users worldwide, we recommend adding a multicurrency switcher. This not only serves for a better user experience but allows you to meet the expectations of potential guests worldwide, especially if your hotel operates on a global scale. From an online marketing perspective, a well-implemented multicurrency setup—especially when paired with localized content—can help your business rank in different regions. Other reasons to consider multicurrency support include:
- Reduce confusion and site abandonment;
- Attract guests from all over the world to your website;
- Integrate with payment gateways;
- Increased global credibility.
Conclusion
As you see, picking SEO and using direct booking plugins and themes as one of the ways to increase hotel direct bookings is definitely a functional way of gaining success. From simple keyword optimization to pricing automation and increasing the number of payment methods, each listed technique can positively influence your business. As a result, you get not only a higher position on search engines but also a continuous flow of direct bookings that make your hotel website a primary place for booking accommodation services. Besides, this approach has the following advantages:
- Increased organic traffic: Optimization of relevant keywords and local terms allows your hotel website to appear in accommodation search results. This brings more organic traffic to your website without requiring any extra funds for digital marketing to boost hotel bookings.
- Boosted site visibility: With improved hotel SEO practices, your site can not only rank higher in search results. Using such an approach will also help you ensure that your hotel’s online presence can be easily found and chosen over your competitors.
- Reduced OTA dependence: Additionally, direct booking combined with proper SEO techniques allows you to lessen your reliance on online travel agencies like Booking. com or Airbnb. As a result, you reduce commission fees that go to OTAs and increase profit from reservations and hotel direct booking strategies.
- Enhanced user experience: One of the less-known advantages of SEO is that it helps with not just keywords. This set of measures also improves website usability as we mentioned earlier, leading to better user experience allowing you to increase direct hotel bookings. This way it influences a smoother direct booking journey for your guests encouraging conversions.
